Every now and then something new comes along that causes you to want to dig down and find out a little more information. Tearing my attention away from Caitlin Jenner for a moment, I thought I'd take a closer look at the remarkable Solar Impulse 2 - an airplane powered solely by solar energy.

Some time back, I had to dig out some ancient filter design tools. I needed a special-purpose digital decimation filter for a "quite high quality" audio communication system. Of course, I was trying to cram this onto one of my company's Programmable Systems on Chip (you know the acronym by now...).

Even though we had only a last minute e-mail blast (Thanks to Tim McCune for expediting the e-mail to the Analog Aficionados) and an Anablog message sent to the Analog Aficionados members, we received far better response than I had expected with 16 attendees at our Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) Silicon Valley luncheon for Analog Aficionados. We even ...

Google is enhancing the IoT with a technology for companies to communicate with customers. The concept: You are in a shopping mall or on a local street and there are hordes of small Bluetooth radios broadcasting marketing messages to all the Android phones in the area (8 of 10 smartphones are Android).

The success of the Toyota Prius is a tribute to the career of Electrical Engineers. I was recently made aware of the achievements of the Prius through a wiki I wrote as well as from the feedback on my recent Planet Analog blog on regenerative braking. I learned some very interesting details about this car and how it puts a feather in the cap of Planet ...

The world of energy storage is full of non-intuitive metrics that can be hard to compare, visualize or place a value to. Engineers love the precision of metrics like amp hours, farads and megajoules, but do you know many people who can tell you how far they can drive on 20 megajoules of energy? Worse yet, what would you see if I asked you to close your ...

As the technologies continues to shrink the various layout affects continue to worsen. What once was not such an issue for integrated circuits is now problematic. LDE or Layout Dependent Effects are becoming worse as the technology continues to shrink. I am sure many of you have heard about well proximity affects and shallow trench isolation effects, but ...

I hope that my recent series of blog posts on IMS2015 in Phoenix was insightful as well as interesting. I really enjoy attending the show and letting folks out there know about the experience. I just read over some show statistics today and it looks like there were over 4,000 attendees; that is quite an impressive number! I hope that by reading about ...

We now view the convenience of sophisticated home-automation systems with their smartphone-enabled, Internet-connected functions such as garage door control as "routine." It wasn't always so, of course, but smart engineers worked some design magic with far fewer options, yet still did clever work.